Artists in Conversation provides a platform to participants from which to expand upon their practice and research in dialogue with invited speakers. On the eve of the opening of our two new exhibitions, Art In The Age Of…Asymmetrical Warfare and Bit Rot by Douglas Coupland, invited artists, designers, researchers, and writers will share their thoughts on issues stemming from the inquiries of each. From Daesh’s (aka Islamic State) recruitment in Europe to information gathering, the mediation of war to the impact of financial technologies.

James Bridle will be in conversation with curator Adam Kleinman (chief editor, WdW Review) to draw out his approach as a writer, programmer, artist, and activist in exposing the covert processes of war such as drone strikes, redacted government documents, and intelligence gathering.

Femke Herregraven will be in conversation with Natasha Hoare (associate curator, Witte de With) to explore the implication of global finance, information, and geopolitics in contemporary conflict. In her work, Herregraven investigates what new material bases, geographies, and value systems contemporary financial technologies and infrastructures carve out.

Artist Navine G. Khan-Dossos will be in conversation with researcher Alexandra Bradford regarding the latter’s research into the unprecedented flow of foreigners into Syria and Iraq—with a particular focus on the recruitment of women to Daesh’s cause. Khan-Dossos’s own parallel inquiries and ensuing series of paintings, Converts, informed the wall painting series at Witte de With, which will be discussed. They will also propose a joint future project, The Consorts of the Caliphate.

Yoeri Meessen (associate Director, Witte de With) and artist, curator and theorist Mohammad Salemy discuss the spatial and temporal dimensions of warfare. Their conversation departs from the latter’s work, currently on view as part of Art In the Age Of…Asymmetrical Warfare, in which the archival footage of different news channels’ coverage of 9/11 show the fragmented reception of this event as mediatized.

Artist Douglas Coupland and Samuel Saelemakers (curator, Witte de With) will discuss some of the key concepts underlying the exhibition Bit Rot, including the dialectics of collecting and deaccessioning, strategies of filtering information, and the ambiguities of logarithmic technologies.

After Artists in Conversation, Douglas Coupland will be signing his new publication Bit Rot.